Monday, December 20, 2004

Well, I'll be heading back home to PA tomorrow, so don't be surprised if you don't see me posting for a while (not like everyone's gonna be on the web all the time anyways :P), but hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Thanks to finding a 10% coupon at Best Buy, I went out and snagged myself a Canon A95 as my late birthday present to myself ^^ The A series of Canon cameras had good reviews from the research that I've done, so I figured I couldn't go wrong picking one up. My brother though the A series were kind of big, but size isn't too much of a issue for me at the moment. With 5 megapixel capability and a plethora of features so that you can manually adjust how you want to take the picture if you didn't want the camera to auto-adjsut everything, this camera will surely last me a while ^^

Now that I actually have a camera, for those who haven't been to my place, you can now see what it actually looks like :P

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

If you're like me and can't sing, here's a nice gift you can give to friends or a loved one, espeically if you are looking to give them an MP3 player for Christmas. Instasong can automatically create a Christmas tune for your needs after you answer a few questions, and if you input the code bc2004, you can make it for FREE!!! To get the song for yourself so you can put it in an MP3 player, at the end of the song creation, just email the link to yourself, listen to the song at the link, and then pull the song from your Temporary Internet File cache in Internet Explorer (or from the folder that caches your webpages for your appropriate browser). A sweet and thoughtful gift for those who need one ^_^

It's that time of year again where we all have wants, and hopefully by Christmas day, those wants will appear under the Christmas tree. As a kid, you always look to that time of year, but it seems like as you get older, that list of wants gets smaller, and you realize that most of what you want you probably already have, or you realize that everything in the world costs money, and for most of us, we don't have an unlimited budget to spend, and I feel I already spent a lot of $$ this year overhauling my computers since I built a new Athlon 64 desktop over the summer and recently got a new Dell 700m laptop >.< But, if I did have an unlimited budget (or I had a uber generous friend who had an unlimited budget to spend), this is what I would want.

1) Mini Cooper: Have you ever seen those Christmas Lexus commercials where they have a Lexus with a huge bowtie waiting in the driveway? Well, I wouldn't mind seeing a Mini Cooper waiting for me with a bowtie on my driveway :P (Estimated Cost: $~20,000)

2) Motorola V3 Razr: The powerbook of cell phones! Simply one of the coolest phones I've seen in a while. (Estimated Cost: $500-700).

3) A Vacation: Being a student for life at the moment, it's hard to find some free time to take a vacation outside of home for an extended period of time. (Estimated Cost: Depends, but probably expensive)

See, even with an unlimited budget, it's tough to think about things I would want. Then again, this might be a good thing since it means I probably have everything I ever want. Anyways, anyone wants to contribute to the Kungfucius Christmas Want Fund, feel free to Paypal any donations to my Paypal account :)

Friday, December 10, 2004

Here's the next evolution in Google: Google Suggest. How it works is as you type, it tries to complete what you are trying to search for and even gives you the potential number of matches, which is pretty cool ^^. Despite Kabitzin's allegations that Google hates Sea Slugs!, if you search for "sea slugs anime", Sea Slugs comes up first :P However, if you put in "anime blog sea slugs" it comes up 4th. So I guess it all depends on how you input your search terms into Google. But go give Google Suggest a try and see how Google roxors.

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Grr...for those who don't know, the Electroscience Lab has been undergoing renovations for the past few weeks. The renovations included repainting the walls and, unfortunately, breaking down walls (from east to west) in a very unquiet manner, and lucky for me my office room just happens to be next to the symphony of sledge hammers, which makes it tough to work at the office in the morning >.< These workers certainly don't work without a sound as the sound of cinder blocks hitting the floor has become ominous all throughout the past few mornings >.<

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

It's that time of year again when my birthday sneaks up on me. Although as you get older, the grandeur of birthdays seems to fall of, but then again in two days, I'm going to be 1/4 of a century old soon, so maybe that calls for a celebration. Man...I'm getting too old :P

I managed to pick up Half-Life 2 along the way, and so far I'm enjoying every minute of it. When you open the box, you're greeted with 5 CDs (Grr...they're really cutting back on packaging as the 5 CDs didn't even come in a jewel case...just 5 paper sleeves), a $20 coupon for a purchase of an ATI video card up till March 1, 2005, and instructions on how to install the game. But other than that, no instructions on the background story or anything. You start the game up, and you're plopped in the middle of the game. So far, I'm not really finding any connection between the first and second game, but hopefully as I get further into the game, there should be more connections that become apparent. Although the game isn't as graphically amazing as say, Doom 3, but the presentation is done very well. Most impressive is how the facial movements sync up with the voice acting very well, better than any game I have ever seen so far. One of the small controversies is the decryption (when you first install the game, the files are encrypted) and verification process of the game through Steam, which is Valve's solution to counter pirates (but of course, Ender finds a way around it :P). Also, once you create your Steam account, the serial number of your HL2 game is forever bound to it. But so far, once you get pass the installation process, Steam only comes up to verify your game before playing, so it doesn't seem overly intrusive. Alas, age seems to have caught up with me as I can't play HL2 for more than an hour before getting dizzy or a headache >.< Ah well, hopefully that'll let me appreciate the moments I spend with the game :P

Wednesday, December 1, 2004

I'm glad to report that I passed the oral part of my qualifying exam this morning ^_^ Overall, the presentation went off ok, but I had sort of a brain fart in the middle of it but managed to recover a bit later. For some reason, my presentation went a bit longer than expected since my advisor had to cut me off in order for him and the two other committee memebers to ask questions. I had about 15 slides, which I thought wasn't too much, but I guess time goes by quickly when you're presenting. But now, I'm officially a Ph.D. student ^_^